Tweaking the Status Quo

Today was a big "tweaking" day for me. It was rollout day for Prepaid Electricity in Guyana. The pic on the right is a utility board director's house getting one of the first prepaid meters. Had a great day, all went well and the software (Juice) that vends electricity worked great in an area with only cell phone text messaging as a means of vending. It was a long day in the sun...but a good one.

Interesting how when the new hookup got run to my house, they had one guy from PG&E with a "cherry picker" truck, in Guyana it's two guys with a ladder. The economics of that are probably obvious, but...

I'm gonna have to get back to 'nooga sometime soon so we can sit and BS and I can get a feel for what all this entails, sounds really cool.

Ziffle: One. Kind-of. I won't stay in it. I'm in the equivelent of a
bed, breakfast and nightclub, an 8-10 room hotel above a jazz club and sidewalk restaurant.
The Jazz Thursday night was absolutely incredible. I'm looking forward to this Thursday, it's "their" night. The food is incredible. I just had prawns and veggies.. It wasn't on the menu, the "waitress" said they had some good prawns tonight.. I asked for veggies instead of rice or potatoes, the "chef" comes out and asks: How do I want them: Coconut fried, or guyanese "pepper" style.
I said: Guyanese. he said: How hot? - I foolishly said: Hit me.

I'm just now starting to feel my lips and tongue again, but darn that was a good tasting burn.

Dan.. I'm looking for an excuse to come out and see your new place, hug you and your "wife" and tell you how much I love you both. I barely know Charlene, but love her just for her putting up with you, and for tolerating me at the Burn in 2002.

Work mode: We got fallout from yesterday. One of the pilot houses ran out of the power that we have then that should have lasted a few days. Seems they were using 4k watts somewhere. We pulled a fuse in a house that everything was "off". and it dropped out, but they would not let us see where that line went.
Something was drawing 3800-4000 watts on that circuit though. We called an electrician because there was a house full of screaming non-rational women with absolutely no comprehension of what electricity really was. The man of the house was decent, but the mob that was congregating was not rational.
With luck, the non-utility electrician will find something and explain it to them.

Note: The lady next door only used .4 kWh overnight, and was relieved to find out that the 10kWh we initially gave her might last a week at her current usage levels. Another customer took a look at their usage per day, and showed up at the utility office and bought and estimated months worth of power, in advance.

In a way, I feel good, completed?. The strange assortment of skills I have picked up over almost 30 years is coming together.

I need to vent somewhere... my apologies for abusing Flutterby, but it's cheaper than the therapy bills.

Just had a discussion with a grad student who wanted to ask me about the history of Flutterby, lots of questions of "why" and "what did you envision" and "how", and I think this sort of venting is *exactly* the answer to those questions.